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On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > At a former research university employer, I talked to a new high-level > research data officer type person, whose team had spent months just trying > to make a list of all (or even most) of the academic/research > organizational units currently existing, and their hiearchical > relationships. Before even getting to change management for the future. No > such list or org chart even existed. > A huge percentage of units can't even tell you who they contain, an issue that gets complicated by constant reorganizations and ephemeral entities. I feel there is another issue at play, namely that librarians are sometimes too quick to let others dump their grunt work on them. For example, if it's important for a department to track its own output when they know better than anyone else who is involved and what they want to track, why do they expect to hand this problem to librarians who will just parse through a bunch of inconsistent and incomplete data they find and cobble together on their own? It's complicated, way more labor intensive and less accurate than anything the department would do, and doomed to failure out the door. Don't get me wrong -- I strongly favor efforts to move things forward. But the critical element in all systems is the interface with the carbon-based liveware, so this has to be baked into any plan from the very beginning. kyle